What is cloud orchestration?

Business organizations turn to cloud orchestrators primarily to tame the inherent complexity of modern cloud environments and to unlock greater strategic value from their cloud investments.

As deployments scale and incorporate diverse services across multiple platforms—be it public, private, or hybrid clouds—manually managing the intricate web of resources, applications, and their dependencies becomes impractical and error-prone. There is a need for a solution.

Cloud orchestrators provide a crucial automation layer of automated governance and control, transforming disjointed automated tasks into cohesive, end-to-end workflows. This allows businesses to reliably deploy, manage, and scale services with speed and precision, ensuring that all components work in concert according to predefined policies.

Furthermore, employing cloud infrastructure orchestrators moves IT operations from a reactive to a proactive stance, fostering agility and innovation.

Cloud orchestration offers numerous business advantages for organizations that need cloud environments, primarily by automating and streamlining complex IT processes for greater efficiency, agility, and cost savings.

• Enhanced operational efficiency: Orchestration automates resource and application deployment, configuration, and management, significantly reducing manual effort and speeding up service provisioning. This allows businesses to react faster to market demands and frees IT staff for more strategic work.
   
• Improved resource optimization: By enabling automated scaling and providing better control over resource consumption, orchestration ensures you only pay for what's needed. This, along with standardized processes, minimizes wasteful spending from misconfigurations or idle resources.
   
• Increased agility: Orchestration tools simplify scaling infrastructure and applications up or down to meet fluctuating demands. This dynamic resource allocation fosters greater business agility and supports rapid adaptation to new opportunities or changing needs.
   
• Strengthened compliance: Orchestration consistently applies the predefined business policies and tools configurations you need, helping maintain security standards and meet compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR). Automated enforcement and audit trails reduce risks associated with human error.
   
• Reduced complexity: It simplifies managing intricate business cloud environments by abstracting underlying details and offering centralized control. Automating processes also significantly cuts down on costly human errors, leading to more stable operations.

It’s also true that as a key DevOps infrastructure tool, orchestration automates CI/CD pipelines, fostering better collaboration between development and operations. This leads to quicker, more frequent, and reliable application releases by automating environment provisioning.

Cloud automation focuses on making individual tasks repeatable and efficient, such as provisioning a server and software code or configuring a network.

Think of it as automating a single step. Cloud orchestration, on the other hand, is a broader concept that involves arranging and coordinating multiple automated tasks (and often, multiple automated systems) into a unified process or workflow.

If automation is about making a specific instrument play its part perfectly, orchestration is about conducting the entire orchestra to perform a complex symphony, ensuring all automated tasks work together to achieve a larger business goal.

Orchestration, therefore, inherently use business automation but adds a layer of process management, interdependency handling, and workflow automation across various systems and business services.

Examples of cloud orchestration tools

The cloud and container orchestration market offers a diverse range of software code tools for teams, each with its strengths, catering to different use needs, cloud environments, and levels of complexity. Here are some prominent examples:

• HashiCorp Terraform: A widely popular open-source IaC tool, Terraform is cloud-agnostic, meaning it can orchestrate infrastructure across numerous cloud providers as well as on-premises environments. It uses a declarative configuration language (HCL) to define and manage infrastructure.
   
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: While also known for configuration management, Ansible is a powerful open-source tool for automation and orchestration. It uses "playbooks" (written in YAML) to describe automation jobs and can orchestrate complex application deployments and multi-step workflows across various environments.
   
• Kubernetes: Primarily known as a container orchestration platform, Kubernetes automates the configuration, deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. While focused on cloud containers, Kubernetes plays a crucial role in modern cloud-native application orchestration by managing microservices and their interactions.
   
• OpenStack Heat: For organizations using the open-source OpenStack cloud platform, Heat is the best native automation and orchestration platform. It allows users to launch composite cloud applications based on text-file templates that define the resources and their interconnections.
   
• Cloudify: This is an open-source, model-driven cloud orchestration platform that focuses on multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It uses blueprints (often written in YAML) to define application topologies and their lifecycle management workflows, enabling orchestration across diverse infrastructures, services and reduce computing time.
   
• Morpheus Data: A comprehensive hybrid cloud management platform that includes robust orchestration and operations capabilities. It provides self-service provisioning, governance, and automation across various cloud and on-premises environments, integrating with many existing tools.
   
• VMware Aria Automation: A cloud automation deployment service that delivers self-service capabilities, DevOps for infrastructure, and configuration management, enabling orchestration across VMware-based private clouds and public clouds.

These examples represent a mix of cloud provider-specific tools for teams, cloud-agnostic solutions, best open-source projects, and enterprise-grade platforms, showcasing the breadth of options available for implementing cloud orchestration and security.

The best choice often depends based on an organization's existing infrastructure, technical expertise, specific use cases, and multi-cloud strategy.

Use cases and applications for cloud orchestration

Cloud orchestration deployment is best applied across various IT operations to streamline complex processes and enhance efficiency. Key applications for this type of software code include:

• Automated environment provisioning: Rapidly and consistently deploy complete development, testing, staging, and production environments, including servers, networks, storage, and databases, using the best predefined templates. This accelerates timelines and standardizes setups.
   
• DevOps and CI/CD pipeline automation: Orchestrate the entire application delivery lifecycle by automating build, test, and deployment stages. This enables faster, more frequent, and reliable releases, supporting practices like canary deployments and blue/green deployments.
   
• Auto-scaling and dynamic resource management: Automatically adjust cloud resources (scaling up or down) based on real-time application demand and predefined policies. This ensures optimal performance during peak loads and cost savings of computing time by preventing over-provisioning.
   
• Disaster Recovery (DR) and business continuity: Automate failover processes to solutions based on secondary sites in case of an outage. This includes bringing up backup infrastructure, restoring data, and redirecting traffic to significantly reduce recovery times and minimize disruption.
   
• Hybrid Cloud and multi-cloud management: Provide a unified control plane to coordinate workflows across private data centers and multiple public cloud providers. This simplifies the management of distributed infrastructures and allows workload placement based on optimal cost, performance, or compliance.
   
• Application lifecycle management: Manage the ongoing operations of applications beyond initial deployment, including automated updates, patching, and scaling throughout their lifespan.

It even enables enable users to request and provision resources or services through a portal, with orchestration tools handling the best automated, policy-compliant fulfillment in the background.

For automated security incident response it can orchestrate teams towards predefined security playbooks to respond automatically to detected threats or vulnerabilities, such as isolating affected systems or blocking malicious IPs.

Finally, considering complex database provisioning and management, cloud orchestration automates the setup, configuration, clustering, and management of database systems, ensuring consistency and adherence to best practices.